Thursday, September 25, 2008

This is a job for Jessica Hagy

Mr. Ledford, women ARE human beings, and when we are denied the rights that men are afforded, humans are denied human rights.

So what does that have to do with abortion? Men can't be pregnant, so they have no rights regarding abortion.

When we talk about women’s rights, we should consider whether they are good things or whether they are the best things, because many people treat them as the best things. Of course, I will say it is better to have women’s rights than not to have women’s rights, but the only way to put women’s rights first is if we are willing to say — which I am not — that women are better and more important than humanity as a whole.

Funny enough, you seem to be treating women's rights as "the best things," and seperable from human rights. Do I need to draw you a Venn diagram here? I see that you're trying to include the right for a fetus to develop to full term in a woman's body amongst the basic human rights, but I am getting stuck on what you are actually saying.

Yes, I will assert that women's rights are more important than fetal rights. Like it or not, women in America are endowed with the right to abort pregnancies under most conditions. It doesn't seem very "arbitrary" for you or anyone to declare the right of a fetus' development in my uterus inviolable in a society where women are shamed and punished for expressing their sexuality. It has an intentional and chilling effect on the behavior of women, which it would be very difficult not to notice.

Note that multiple commenters at the Argonaut have declared that women don't have any right to sex if they ever want to have abortions.

Not all of humanity is currently residing in a woman's uterus, so the rights of the nearly 7 billion people on the planet and the rights of the proto-people in women's uteruses are going to play out differently even if we "arbitrar[ily]" decide that women get to control who's taking residence in their body.

Thanks for simplifying things by fabricating a competition for human rights between women and the rest of humanity, and deciding that the essential conflict between a woman's right to bodily autonomy and a fetus' desire to set up shop in my body is a done deal, with my right being nonexistent and my protestations moot.